This exultant line does not exactly mark the beginning of Faust — a two-part play whose beginning is, in fact, hard to identify. Part One opens with a night scene in which we see Faust, heartsick and alone, in a dimly lit Gothic room, conjuring demons and contemplating suicide. It is here that an Easter hymn, sung by an invisible chorus, breaks in. The disillusioned professor is lifting a vial of poison to his lips, when he hears this:

“Christ is arisen!
Blest is the man of love,
He who the anguishing,
Bitter, exacting test,
Salvation bringing, passed.”

In a literal sense, Goethe’s antihero is saved by Christ — “the man of love” — in Faust’s first dramatic sequence. We will return to this scene. But before we see Faust in his gloomy chamber — and hear, with him, a Romantic Easter song — Goethe presents his readers with a trio of other introductions. First, he presents a haunting verse dedication to the play’s “dear shadows”. From there, he moves on to a cynical prelude, in which a theatre-manager tells the poet he only has one job to do: “Deliver the goods.” Then he presents an allegorical conversation set in the throne room of heaven, in which the Lord himself gives Mephisto, one of the “spirits of negation”, carte blanche to lead Faust into temptation.

There seems to be no end, then, of Faust’s beginnings. And this is by design. The motto of Faust Part One reveals that the start is the crux of Goethe’s play: “In the beginning was the Deed!” This is a brazen misstatement of the first verse of The Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Goethe’s huge drama turns upon Faust’s deep unhappiness with just that beginning, that Christian beginning, and his spectacular challenge to it. (Crucially, the challenge is not only his. A certain Mephisto is on the scene too.) It is only after Goethe lures us through some 400 pages of eerie verse that — in the last stanza of Part Two, and of the play itself — a mystical chorus corrects (or half-corrects) the professor’s error. “Everything transitory,” we read, “is symbolic only.”

Faust’s total veneration of the Deed is not given the final word in Goethe’s tragedy. But what are we to make of this iconic modern drama of Word and Deed — of soul-selling and demonic influence, of delusion and redemption? Whatever else we might decide, few would object to a framing statement we find in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan drama, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus: namely that the figure of Faust in some way concerns “both Germany and the world”.

Why Germany? The historical Faustus, a Latin sobriquet meaning “fortunate one”, was Germanic. Marlowe knows this, and dubs him “the German conjurer”. According to the historian Anthony Grafton, he was probably based on Georg of Helmstadt, who took a Master of Arts from the University of Heidelberg in the 1480s. In any case, Grafton writes, the shadowy character who comes to be known as Faust made use of “expert knowledge of optics, light, and shadow” — all designed to thrill and terrify his contemporaries with images that “seemed to move”. The real Faust was a Renaissance magus, or, as we might now say, a master of simulacra.

Naturally, German artists have not forgotten Faust’s origins. The most accomplished conjuration of a specifically German Faust is probably Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel, Doctor Faustus, written in Pacific Palisades, California, in which Hitler’s Reich offers “the embrace of demons” that locks Mann’s fatherland into a nightmare of criminality and despair. Doctor Faustus is a captivating treatment of the theme, and one of the great Hollywood novels. But it still seems fair to conclude that Marlowe was right. The Faust myth is not purely national. Faust is a spiritual figure — and, as such, a civilizational one.

Ironically, it is a hardcore German nationalist, Oswald Spengler, who argues most compellingly that Faust is not a German, but rather a world-historical figure. For Spengler, something like a “Faustian soul” fueled the rise — and is now suffering the decline — not just of Germany, but of the West as a whole. The “Faustian world-feeling” is, to his mind, a decisive factor in the ever-more-rapidly unfolding world-history of modernity.

But what meaning does Spengler give to that half-mythical descriptor: “Faustian”? In Spengler’s momentous Decline of the West, written about a century ago, he claims that the Faustian life-force of the West is something like “a will-to-power over the infinite”. This formulation is virtually lifted from the pages of Nietzsche, whose late 19th-century elevation of “will-to-power” is well known. And this suggests, to me at least, that Spengler’s idea of a Faustian West might be connected, however obscurely, to the pathologically anti-Christian will that Nietzsche expresses in his final text, The Anti-Christ. We might therefore ask: Is the essence of the Faustian legacy, in a declining West, the attitude of “the anti-Christ”?

The simplicity of this question is unnerving, and Spengler would not like it. He seems to think that it is not Nietzsche’s anti-Christian spleen, but rather the redemptive finale of Goethe’s Faust, together with Richard Wagner’s Romantic-Christian opera Parsifal, which can “disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume” in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Nevertheless, the simple question of Faust’s anti-Christianity brings us back to the curious beginning of Goethe’s play, in which it is the memory of Christ’s death and resurrection that keeps Faust from killing himself.

Spengler comments on this critical moment. He calls it, in passing, Faust’s “Easter scene”. But what I want to ask is this: What if there is not only one “Easter scene” in Goethe’s Faust? What if, rather, this whole myth of tragic modernity is framed by Easter, and by the events that Christians commemorate on that day? What if, furthermore, the real legacy of Faustian modernity is not just — as Mann and others have thought — the hellish Nazi interlude, but rather a far more enduring tendency to anti-Christianity in the West? What if, in other words, it is precisely Faust’s anti-Christian attitude which is somehow at the heart of Western malaise?

It is time to return, with these questions in mind, to the scene in which the drama of Faust’s soul begins. It is titled simply “Night”. Throughout the scene, Goethe’s unstable Herr Doktor is both citing and mis-citing the gospels — and especially The Gospel According to John. One of these echoes is decisive: Faust says that there is no book, no text, which could satisfy his “eternal thirst” (Durst auf ewig). His wording distinctly recalls a scene in John Chapter 4, in which Jesus tells a woman in Samaria: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

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On the night before Easter, Faust is thirsty. And on the play’s fateful Easter day, when Faust first meets Mephisto, his own personal demon, Christ’s sayings in John 4, are on his mind. “You long to drink the living waters”, Faust confesses to himself, until Mephisto interrupts him. The bitter professor knows, and the play’s 19th-century readers all knew, that “living water” is what Jesus mystically offers to the woman in Samaria. It is precisely because Faust is not drinking the spiritual water he longs to drink — however we might interpret his longing, or his failure — that he signs his soul over to Mephisto, a nihilist avant la lettre, and embraces the devil’s element, fire.

I call such echoes of John 4 decisive, not only because they reveal the depth of Faust’s sickness of heart, in the first scenes of the play, but because they are still sounding in Faust’s final stanzas. Here, in the chaos of love, or the clamor of grace, that meets a half-repentant Faust in the afterlife, we encounter a radiant figure — one of Faust’s angelic intercessors, who is given by Goethe a simple Latin title: Mulier Samaritana. “The Samaritan Woman.” And Goethe tells us, in his play’s margin, so no one can miss it, where he is taking his inspiration from: “Saint John 4.” This is how the Samaritan Woman pleads for Faust’s soul:

“By the pail which, when he thirsted,
Cooled the lips of our Savior,
By the streams of living water
Pouring out from that pure fountain
Prodigally and forever,
Flowing through all of creation –”

It is not Mephisto’s fire, but Jesus’ water — in Goethe’s unorthodox conception of it — that lives on, in this stanza, after Faust dies.

Faust’s drama, which is paschal at the beginning, is still paschal at the end. At the instant of his antihero’s death, Goethe quotes — yet again — from The Gospel According to John: “It is finished.” Though some translations obscure the biblical reference, Goethe’s German is identical to Martin Luther’s translation in John Chapter 19, where Jesus says, from the cross: “It is finished” (Es ist vollbracht). But we must, of course, ask: what is finished? Faust’s lurid drama is linked to the gospels’ paschal narrative. But how?

We might say by corruption, with an eye to Faust’s alteration of John’s canonical line. After all, “In the beginning was the Word” becomes “In the beginning was the Deed”. Or we might say by negation, since Mephisto, a cynical mystagogue, tells us, and then shows us, that he is “the spirit that says no, no”. But none of this goes far enough. Goethe’s play is in fact structured by Faust’s imprecation, and then, persecution of Christianity. He becomes, decades before Nietzsche, a partisan of “the anti-Christ”.

Faust’s rejection of “the old, the true religion” — as Mephisto dryly calls it — is part of the process. This is how deals with the devil get done. And Faust complies. “I pronounce a curse”, he says:

“Curse love on its pinnacle of bliss,
Curse faith, so false, curse all vain hope!”

It is really Saint Paul who is being cursed, here, for having the audacity to write in his First Letter to the Corinthians that “faith, hope, and love abide”. Faust is a myth of tragic modernity precisely in so far as it is determined by this conscious repudiation of the Christian beyond — in faith, hope, and love.

Yet if Faust’s curse on Christianity is a structuring moment in Part One, what do I mean by his persecution of Christianity? This comes towards the end of Part Two, in the days before Faust’s death. After he and Mephisto have provided some necromantic help to the forces of European unification, Faust settles, with Mephisto, naturally, near an undisclosed coastline. Here, he begins a new life as a visionary property developer. The venture ends badly. His final property development is — his grave.

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But before Faust’s slave-laborers lower him into the pit, there is a sequence of events that confuses many commentators. Along the shoreline that Faust wants to develop is an elderly couple — “kind, pious people” — who live in a simple house, within a copse of linden trees, beside a rustic chapel. They refuse to sell their land to the man who has sold his soul. What is more, they sense that Faust’s seemingly progressive venture is in fact primitive and cruel. “Men were sacrificed,” the wife tells her husband, “I’m certain.” And what is her intuition about Faust? “Godless,” she concludes, “he imagines we’re his slaves.”

With his own death impending, Faust becomes obsessed with this poor old couple. It is not only that their recalcitrance irritates him, or that their mere existence ruins his view of a newly cleared coastline. What drives Faust to distraction is the “churchlike, tomblike” clanging of their chapel bell. This lone, liturgical act materializes — not only for them, but for him — their commitment to the “old God” that Faust — a devotee, now, only of his own will — has abandoned. “Come,” they say quietly to each other:

“We’ll walk out to the chapel,
Watch the sun sink to its rest,
Ring the bell and kneeling, pray.”

But there is more. For on the night before Easter, just as the suicidal professor begins to hear the old exultant words — “Christ is arisen!” — in Faust’s first scene, we read this in Goethe’s text: Glockenklang. “Bells peal.” Symbolically it is these Easter bells that ring — but from a harassed and isolated church, now — as Faust, long-declining, nears his denouement.

Before he dies, Faust silences the bells. Mephisto and his enforcers set fire to the old couple’s chapel — and their house. They burn to death inside. In this way, the last Christians left on Goethe’s stage are martyred. Faust is — imperfectly, briefly — repentant. He thinks back on the days before his apostasy, before he gave himself over to

“The things of darkness, cursed the world, myself,
Impiously. Now ghosts so fill the air …”

Ours too, seems to be a time when, strangely, ghosts fill the air. It was a friend of Goethe’s, Novalis, a Christian Romantic, who once said: “Where there are no gods, ghosts reign.” Perhaps there is something for us in Novalis’ dictum — and in Goethe’s drama. And, perhaps, every year, while the Easter bells still peal, we are not only being drawn into a circle of sacred memory, but being reminded to look to the future, and ask: on what venture are we embarked? And with what forces are we in league?

How so? Because she has saved her one true love: the West. The real, European West, that is, not the “West” of wild, freebooting Ayn Rand-style fantasies which burst out when Communism fell (remember those “Ulster Scots” values which Anglosphere scribes so adored in the early 1990s? Remember Steve Bannon and his “we are all Leninists” ravings?). She understood what the West really means.

How could she not, with her life story? Unlike almost everyone else in East Germany, she was there not because of bad luck and barbed wire. Her father, a pastor, moved of his own free will from Hamburg to the East shortly after her birth in 1954, becoming a senior figure in the Lutheran Church there. This is less surprising than it sounds because the Lutherans, with their strict demarcation of worldly and spiritual realms (meaning that in practice they never seriously criticise the state) have been welcome helpmeets to rulers in eastern Germany ever since the Teutonic Knights embraced Luther, broke with Rome and founded their very own new state: Prussia.

The Wall went up when she was seven. She must have grown up knowing that she could have been a West German. As a distinctly talented young scientist working within the insane ideological bounds of Marxism-Leninism, she must have felt every day, directly, the effects of Papa Merkel’s deluded utopianism. At 35, she lived the triumph of the West not only as simple, literal freedom but also as mental freedom, at last, from the structural mendacity into which millennial ideas inevitably descend.

She swiftly embraced the CDU, that quintessentially western German party, directly descended from the Catholic Centre Party which had been founded specifically to oppose Bismarck’s Prussianisation of the West. It understands, and she understood, that the historical uniqueness of “the West” is not untrammelled, individual “freedom” but the principle that deals are cut and power shared between great institutions, neither of which will ever yield total domination to the other. This paradigm — the ultimate guarantee of freedom — goes back to 754AD, when Europe was rebooted from the Dark Ages in the great bargain of St Denis: the Frankish dynasty got the sanction of Rome, while the Church got worldly lands and Germanic muscle to defend it. Ever since, call it what you will — Church and State, King and Parliament, Checks and Balances — the principle stands against every heady fantasy, Left or Right, of some perfect society.

This is the key to Merkel’s instinct for seeking out the centre ground. She realised fast and early what all sane people eventually learn: that noisy idealism is not a virtue, but a curse, and that quiet, deal-making realism is not the absence of conviction, but its pure expression. No political lesson could be more different from the dire mix of grandstanding in the moment and backstabbing in the dark which our own Big Beasts learn in the gilded testosterone snake-pits of Eton and the Oxford Union.

Yes, she has been very lucky. It is almost comical now to recall the way that under Helmut Kohl, Germany was regularly written off by triumphant Anglosphere pundits as a dead weight on the European economy and even (declared The Economist in June 1999), “the sick man of Europe”. All that was changed by the Social Democratic/Green governments of 1998-2005, who modernised things in a thoroughly Blairite way (they even called their new, and far less generous, social security offices “Job Centres”, in English, by way of blatant homage).

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And yes, she made breathtaking mistakes. Her 2011 decision to close all of Germany’s nuclear power stations in the wake of Fukushima was either a kneejerk reaction, or a cunning plan to win over Germany’s Green voters. The need to replace nuclear led her to keep filthy brown coal power stations open and to support the Nordstrom gas pipeline which feeds German industry’s maw directly from Russia. As a result, Germany is incredibly vulnerable to energy blackmail from Moscow, Putin’s regime has been mightily succoured, and the average German citizen now produces getting on for twice as much atmospheric carbon as the average Frenchman or Brit.

When she unilaterally decided in autumn 2015 to open Germany (and thereby, in practice, Europe) to mass immigration from the Middle East and elsewhere, one can only imagine that she was trying to recapture the moral high ground from the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, who had been telling the world that in the wake of the financial crash she was acting like some kind of economic Nazi (images of Merkel sporting a Hitler moustache were seen all over southern Europe and even in Ireland).

As the rest of Europe predictably failed to follow her high-minded, high-handed lead, Germany seemed for a while to be tottering on the edge of serious public discontent: just think back to 2016 and 2017, when gloomy liberals and delighted Trump-and-Brexit boosters were both intoning that the AfD was going to break out from its base in the old East Germany and tear into the CDU. Some in Merkel’s party itself were proclaiming that the only way to survive was to “close off the right flank” (die rechte Flanke schliessen) — i.e., adopt the AfD’s policies.

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History must have been in the mood to make things pretty obvious for once, since it has given us the most perfect mathematical example of how, and how not, to deal with loud-mouthed populism. In 2017, the AfD won 12.6% of the national vote. That is, of course, exactly the same as Ukip won here in 2015. And look now at the tale of these two conservative parties.

The spineless David Cameron felt besieged by the people who eminent Tory predecessors had called “bastards” (John Major) and like “some demented Marxist sect” (Douglas Hurd) — and who he himself allegedly called “swivel-eyed loons”. So he rolled over and gave them the referendum he didn’t want himself, and which was the only way they would ever be able to enact their anti-EU, Anglosphere fantasies. He was blithely sure he would win, and hence become unchallengeable.

The stout Angela Merkel thought otherwise: I have twice been told by a German insider (I can’t name him, but he is undoubtedly of the status to have been the eyewitness he says he was) that at the 2015 G7 meeting at Schloss Elmau, Merkel, Cameron’s best friend in Europe, personally begged him not to hold his utterly needless referendum and “throw away 800 years of parliamentary rule”. But what? Have patience? See things quietly through? Make a rational, cross-party deal for what the vast majority of MPs on both sides agreed was the good of the country? Not he. If Angela Merkel had been Germany’s David Cameron, God alone knows where we would now be.

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Instead, she stuck to her guns. She toughed it out. She refused point blank to trim her course in order to pick up AfD voters, or ever to countenance any form of coalition with the populist Right, even when siren voices urged it. The result is that the AfD, far from making any further advances into the old German West, is retreating even in its eastern fastnesses.

She may have made her mistakes, but when the healing sleep of time (as Goethe called it in Faust) has washed away her quotidian errors, she will be remembered as the leader who carried the CDU, not the other way around, and who saved the West in its hour of trial. And as she leaves the stage, irrespective of which coalition Germany ends up with, she will be able to say, like a German Mr Chips, “I thought I heard you — one of you — saying it was a pity Mutti never had any children … eh? … But I have, you know … I have … look, thousands of them – and all of them decent Western Centrists!”

Ave et vale, Angela Merkel, and thank God you were there when we needed you.